To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limberAnd lift up a patch. dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top,--That was moss-gathering.But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpetsOf green, or plunged to me elbow in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swapland;Distrubed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planet;As if I had commiteed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.